Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Autistici - Temporal Enhancement

Dronarivm: 2015

Autistici is someone I regret coming into so cold. As with many larks and flights of music buying fancy, I picked this up with no prior knowledge of the artist and no checks of prior material. I can never tire of that thrill in random chance purchases, browsing through shops where cover art is your only clues of what’s within (erm, and good sorting). And I cannot deny some of its present with Bandcamp pages, having a label’s output nicely laid out for your perusal convenience. It’s definitely led me to a few splurges these past couple years, content in the knowledge my monies are feeding a more direct route to the artist than most options (or, in the case of used shop shopping, not at all). While neither Autistici nor the label Dronarivm are names I’ve any familiarity with, their association with others that I do know was enough for the blind pickup.

All this, of course, is just a roundabout way of making excuses for whatever gaps of knowledge I’ll undoubtedly commit in the next few hundred words. For Autistici, or David Newman in the Sheffield phone directory, strikes me as an artist that requires a proper full-discography plunge, if only to understand how his craft has evolved over time. Temporal Enhancement is his fifth album on a fifth label, despite the fact he has his own print (Audiobulb Records). His approach to music is less musicality, and more explorations of singular sounds, going for pure abstraction of field recordings, noises, and manipulations of natural tones. His music can be quite soothing, melodic, and calming drone, but he’d just as soon go noisy and harsh with a cacophony of experimental percussion. Taking in quick Spotify sampling, the one clear consistency through all of Autistici’s work I noticed is never resting on singular ideas for long, elements coming and going even if it creates a complete tonal clash within the track itself.

So too is the case with Temporal Enhancement, a collection of six tracks, most averaging four-to-five minutes. There’s also a nine-plus minute closer, and a whopping seventeen-minute composition smack in the middle, and as good a summation of the album as any.Habituation Of The Heart darkly drones along for a significant amount of time, ghostly voices and electronic sparks creating an oddly spacious yet claustrophobic setting traditional industrial sorts would approve of. Just when creaking, contorting sounds make the atmosphere almost unbearable, a release, with gentle heartbeat pulsing through soft white noise, distant lullaby and children at play easing you out.

Temporal Enhanncement as a whole plays out like this, abrasive sonic assaults making up the first half, with gentler, dubbed-out works making up the backend. Mr. Newman described this album as an exploration of the human condition, and with titles like Opened Up Too Quickly, Thinking Before Feeling, and The Grotesque Physicality Of Waiting, I’d say he sums things up just fine, if in a rather over-stimulated fashion at times. Mm, Ritalin with a Xanax chaser.